Hi,

Just an idea regarding the 'monthly sales/earnings'
I see a lot of 'best month ever' and in terms of earnings, august was my best month too.
But isn't that so because we keep adding photo's? And hopefully get better and add better photo's.
So how fair is it to compare eg. a july where you have 150 photo's online with an august with 175 photo's (or whatever).

So how can we make this more objective?
One way of doing it is by dividing the sales by the total number of photos you have online. (and to get a more workable number multiply it by 100, to get your earnings per photo in cents).

eg. lets say you have 150 pictures on 4 sites so a total of 600 images online.
And you earned that month $75, it simply comes down to ($75/600 * 100) = 12.5
We could call it the Portfolio Sales Index or Monthly Sales Index
It also says something about your portfolio itself since the better you pictures the more sales and the higher the number. Eg Someone with 100 pictures that bring $50/month has a much higher index then someone with 400 pictures and $50.

Obviously what is interesting is your personal change in that number over the months.
If i calculate that index for my own portfolio over the past few months, it comes to:

May      11.49
June     10.08
July        9.65
August 10.64
Interesting to see May was better then August (although i earned less). (perhaps i made worse pictures after )
My portfolio isn't great, i have photo's in there that never sold, and obviously if you delete those the number goes up. So be careful with that, perhaps (if you want to) delete only a few a month not to influence your index too much.

If anybody has a better idea, lets hear!

Most people here already calculate that number and refer to it as $/image.  However the way I have seen it calculated is slightly different to yours.

My own calculation is to take the average of the total images at each agency and divide that into money earned.  The reason for this is that as each agency has the same images, the division provides the actual income per month per unique image available for sale.

Sharply done, very interesting graphs, especially SS. We can see clearly  the trend of their  subscription model. Most people made the most money in the first  month of SS then ?
Cheers

Laurent

When I calculate my total $/image I always exclude SS because it doesn't compare.

Interesting charts sharply.  I agree completely that things settle down after a few months and once a portfolio reaches a larger size - only then can true trends be seen.

You and I both started at a similar time (in fact I didn't get going seriously until April).  Looking back, those start dates coincided with a peak in page views, and since then we have been fighting against declining activity.

Although your charts (and mine) tell a story in concrete terms, the story they don't tell is success or otherwise relative to page views, overall activity and seasonal trends.  I suspect that if the numbers could be adjusted for page view activity, that would give a clearer signal of what to expect in the months ahead (assuming activity picks up between now and next April).

Of course one can go on and on crunching numbers.  I suppose it might be easier to ask just two simple questions:  "Can I eat today?" and "Is that caviar or the dog's leftovers.....?"

I think an accurate calculation is :

Total number of images processed / Total earnings

If you have 100 images processed/submitted, but only 50 accepted at IS, 75 at SS, ... you still need to take those rejected images into the calculation you to know how good you're doing.  Your rejections took up a certain amount of your time too.

Impressive graphs sharply. I have something similar too.